The Night English Wine Beat Champagne: Nyetimber’s Charles Lowe Reveals How They Did it

In 2025, at the International Wine Challenge, the Champion Sparkling Wine trophy went to a sparkling wine that wasn’t Champagne for the first time in the competition’s 34-year history – add to that, it also went to an English sparkling wine, and that’s quite the coup. The winner was Nyetimber’s Blanc de Blancs 2016 Magnum, and Charles Lowe, the estate’s Brand Ambassador, still tells it like he can’t quite believe it. 

“It’s the first time Champion Sparkling Wine hasn’t been won by a Champagne in around 30 years,” he says, “and, obviously, the first time it’s been won by an English sparkling wine at all.” But that’s not all – Nyetimber’s Head Winemaker Cherie Spriggs took Sparkling Winemaker of the Year at the same ceremony, her second such win since 2018. Two of the industry’s biggest honours, same year, same estate.

An industry that’s suddenly being taken seriously

Ask Charles what the win really did, and he doesn’t talk about trophies. He talks about who was watching. “The general public’s understanding of sparkling wine, especially in this country, has increased significantly,” he says. “So an award like this reaches even more people than it would have a decade ago. Massive for us – but also huge for the category as a whole.”

He’s not wrong. Critic scores for English sparkling wine now sit within a fraction of a point of Champagne’s, and searches for it are growing faster than almost any other sparkling category, according to a 2025 report from wine analysts Wine Lister. Nyetimber leads that shift, with more restaurant wine-list listings than any other English producer.

A meteoric rise, by wine’s standards

What makes it more remarkable is how little time English sparkling wine has had to get here. England’s first commercial sparkling wine only went into production in the early 1950s, at Hambledon in Hampshire. Nyetimber wasn’t founded until 1986, its first vines planted two years later. Dutch lawyer Eric Heerema bought the estate in 2006, and since 2007 the winemaking has belonged to Cherie Spriggs and her husband Brad Greatrix – the same team behind that award-winning Blanc de Blancs.

“When you consider that Champagne has had the benefit of learning over 300 years while English sparkling has only been around for 40 years, it’s a meteoric rise,” Charles points out. 

The vintage Nyetimber refused to make

Charles explains that Nyetimber has an “unwaverable position on quality – even if this means making difficult decisions”.

“Quality has to come first in every scenario,” he says, “regardless of how good or bad the vintage.” 

This commitment meant that the Nyetimber team faced a dilemma in 2012, an unusually poor growing season: use the fruit they had, or make nothing at all.

“We could have made around 250,000 bottles of wine that year,” Charles explains. “But for the level of wine we wanted to produce, the quality of the grapes just wasn’t good enough. We didn’t want someone’s first ever bottle of English sparkling wine to be a bad experience instead of a good one.”

So, the decision was made to not create any wine from the 2012 harvest at all. It was a tough call at the time, but led to a happy accident – the creation of a new multi-vintage programme that blends reserve wines to guarantee consistency, whatever any single harvest brings.

There are now three multi-vintage wines in Nyetimber’s portfolio, all helping to seal the estate’s position as English sparkling wine of choice.

Seven wines, one philosophy

Nyetimber only produces sparkling wine, because, as Charles says, “that’s what we’re really good at.”

“In Champagne, they focus on sparkling wine,” he says. “It’s the same thing at Nyetimber; we want to produce the best we can in the English sparkling category.”

Nyetimber has seven sparkling wines in its portfolio:

• Classic Cuvée: the flagship blend of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, aged around 36 months on lees. “A really nice way to enter into the Nyetimber portfolio,” according to Charles.
• Rosé Multi-Vintage: “British summer fruit in a glass,” in Charles’s words.
• Cuvée Chérie: a touch of sweetness without losing the freshness.
• Blanc de Blancs: 100% Chardonnay, the IWC’s newly-crowned champion, aged around six and a half years on lees for “creamy, dairy-centric qualities.”
• Tillington: a single-vineyard, mostly Pinot Noir wine from a plot singled out on the estate in 2009 for its “sense of place.”
• 1086 White: the rarest wine in the range, drawn from four hand-selected parcels, longer ageing on the lees and a production run of under 10,000 bottles.
• 1086 Rosé: a wine of extraordinary character and grace, produced only in the best years from the most impressive parcels.

Is Nyetimber better than Champagne?

With the accolade of Champion Sparkling Wine, it would be easy to frame Nyetimber as an English answer to Champagne. Charles disagrees. 

“We use the same grapes, the same method, but they’re inherently different things,” he says. England’s cooler climate slows ripening, producing wines that lean more citrus-driven and delicate, where Champagne tends to be richer and warmer in character.”

Growth from here is about exposure. As Charles says, it’s about “showing people how good English sparkling wine can be and getting it into as many hands as we can.” 

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